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Domino is
a "disarmingly
straight-forward"
work that "pushes
us to reexamine our
relationship to images
and their consumption,
not only ethically
but metaphysically"
-Collin Brinkman

De Palma on Domino
"It was not recut.
I was not involved
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sessions, the final
mix or the color
timing of the
final print."

Listen to
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De Palma/Lehman
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De Palma/Lehman
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based on real things
that have happened
in the news"

Supercut video
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edited by Carl Rodrigue

Washington Post
review of Keesey book

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Exclusive Passion
Interviews:

Brian De Palma
Karoline Herfurth
Leila Rozario

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AV Club Review
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Tuesday, March 18, 2014
'HERE COMES THE DEVIL' DIRECTOR CITES DE PALMA
AS WELL AS FULCI, ON DVD/BLU-RAY COMMENTARY TRACK


According to The Oregonian's Marc Mohan, on the DVD audio commentary track for Adrián García Bogliano's Here Comes The Devil, Bogliano cites Brian De Palma and Lucio Fulci, among others, as influences on the film. "With its incestuous intimations, over-the-top violence and sometimes brazen sexuality, Here Comes the Devil isn't for the faint of heart," states Mohan, "but Bogliano's alternately tense and disorienting 1970s style works as more than an affectation. On the disc's audio commentary track, he cites influences including Richard Stanley's Dust Devil, the Italian filmmaker Lucio Fulci and Brian De Palma. Fans of any of those should find much to appreciate here."

Posted by Geoff at 11:35 PM CDT
Updated: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 11:37 PM CDT
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Friday, March 14, 2014
'OPEN WINDOWS' PREMIERES AT SXSW
SASHA GREY: INSPIRATION WAS MORE 'BLOW OUT' THAN 'REAR WINDOW'
With Grand Piano and now Open Windows, Elijah Wood seems to be working on a string of thrillers inspired by Brian De Palma. The latter film had its premiere at South By Southwest yesterday. Back in 2012, as he was getting ready to shoot Open Windows, director Nacho Vigalondo told Screen Daily's Melanie Goodfellow, "Just as in Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, the girl is captured. The hero will have to use every means at his disposal to discover where she is, and rescue her from the villain before its too late.” Vigalondo's 2007 film Timecrimes is said to be a variation on De Palma's Body Double. Judging by the trailer, Open Windows appears to have elements of Body Double, as well.

Sasha Grey, who co-stars with Wood in Open Windows, once joked that she was making Body Double 2, as she modeled herself for the lenses of Richard Phillips in the John Lautner chemosphere house, used prominently in Body Double. Grey tells The Daily Beast's Marlow Stern that Open Windows was inspired more by Blow Out than Rear Window:
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Marlow: Back to Open Windows, it seems to combine the voyeuristic Rear Window conceit with the whole “cam girl” phenomenon, which has really transformed into a huge sub-industry in the porn world.

Sasha Grey: I think Blow Out was more of an inspiration. But with the cam girl thing, it’s interesting because there were a few girls who did this in the ‘90s when no one was doing it, made millions, and retired. But now, with the advent of Internet porn, people can see professional-quality material online, and now we’re regressing and going back to not caring about the quality. But the fascination goes back to having a connection with the person you’re watching and having this “intimate” experience. It’s a need to satisfy the soul. The Internet has brought us together globally, but also separated us. And people now don’t have that intimacy in their real lives, so they go online.

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Posted by Geoff at 1:45 AM CDT
Updated: Friday, March 14, 2014 1:47 AM CDT
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Saturday, March 8, 2014
MORE 'GRAND PIANO' REVIEWS
DE PALMA CONTINUES TO BE FREQUENTLY MENTIONED


Eugenio Mira's Grand Piano has been available on demand for about a month, and is now slowly making its way to select theaters. The screenplay was written by Damien Chazelle, who had originally planned to direct it, according to Deadline's Brian Brooks. Chazelle did end up directing another script he wrote, Whiplash, a story about a drummer (played by Miles Teller) that was the talk of this year's Sundance Film Festival. Music seems to be Chazelle's thing, as his next film, "La La Land," is said to be a romantic musical about an actress and a jazz musician.

Regarding Grand Piano, Mira tells Brooks, "The irony of this movie is that 20 years ago it would be a mainstream movie. Richard Donner and the late John Frankenheimer are directors that I grew up with and I loved and for some reason, Hollywood has failed to deliver [today].”

After Grand Piano's world premiere at Austin's Fantastic Fest last September, we posted links to several reviews that frequently mentioned filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Brian De Palma, and Dario Argento. With the theatrical release this weekend, there are more such reviews popping up. Here are some more links:

Drew McWeeny, HitFix
"If you saw Eugenio Mira's earlier film Agnosia, then you may have already noticed his fondness for Brian De Palma. Anyone making thrillers who holds De Palma as part of the pantheon is already on my short list of people I like, but when you see how well Mira pulls it all together for Grand Piano, it's obvious that he's graduated to a different level with this film.

"I think it's very fair to compare this to Non-Stop, which I reviewed earlier today, since both of them are thrillers that take place over a compressed period of time in a fairly restrictive setting with a ticking clock. For both filmmakers, the exercise is the same. Can you keep the film somewhat plausible while ratcheting up the tension and convincing us that things could unfold like this? In the case of Grand Piano, the answer is a resounding yes, and I was delighted by just how playful and fun this is."

Glenn Dunks
"Eugenio Mira’s Grand Piano has a thoroughly ridiculous premise that borrows liberally from films such as Jan de Bont’s Speed, David Fincher’s Panic Room, and, most strikingly, Joel Schumacher’s Phone Booth. Much like that 2002 thriller with Colin Farrell as a man stuck in a telephone booth with a sniper’s rifle fixed on him, Mira’s films features a more-or-less single location with a lone man aware of the stakes and an escalating tension that is seemingly at odds with its intimate focus. Needless to say, it is a better film than Phone Booth, but that may be because the Spanish director (Grand Piano is in fact a Spain/US co-production) decided to reference Brian De Palma more than his most direct influence, Alfred Hitchcock.

"There’s a playfulness to Grand Piano that is deeply rewarding. It’s slick, 35mm lensing is drenched in bold colours, interesting compositions and in some sequences a sense of virtuosic camera trickery. Despite its compact confines, Mira’s film recalls the more heightened sense of Hitchcockian style that ebbs and flows throughout De Palma’s Blow Out, Body Double, or Dressed to Kill rather than the elegance of Hitchcock’s boutique thrills like Rope or The Lady Vanishes. It is a style that is perhaps too obvious for its own good, and yet one that works. It elevates the film and allows its moments of flight and fancy to not strike one as absurd or over-the-top. The entire film is working on a level of OTT sublime that is as much seat-grippingly intense as it is giggle-inducing."

A.A. Dowd, A.V. Club
"Mira, for his part, just gets his Brian De Palma on, most notably during a split-screen sequence that puts the harried hero on one side of the frame and a brutal murder on the other."

Kevin Taft, Edge on the Net
"A nifty little thriller that should cement director Eugenio Mira as 'the' director to watch, Grand Piano is filled with Hitchcockian suspense and gorgeous shades of Brian DePalma. With a compelling performance by Elijah Wood... the film is a noose-tightening 80 minutes of masterful direction... Credit must also go to cinematographer Unax Mendia who swoops around the stage like a magician making what could be a claustrophobic film feel spacious and alive. The music by Victor Reyes is flawless and, of course, Eugenio Mira handles the proceedings like an old school master. It’s a harrowing and nail-biting piece that is well worth tuning in for."

William Bibbiani, Crave Online
"Grand Piano is the more playful cousin of Chazelle’s other script this year, Whiplash (a film he also directed), a tale of a drumming prodigy and his abusive professor that also demonstrates the horrifying relationship between antagonism and perseverance. Chazelle seems fascinated by the notion that the ends might just justify the means, and that opposition to true villainy is a prerequisite for becoming a hero. He may be right but it’s a scary message to send to sensitive art students who have probably been bullied enough already, unless schools have changed dramatically since I attended them.

"So while Eugenio Mira may be having the time of his life finding ways for Selznick to secretly call for help, and in offing one-by-one the poor saps who might be able to save him, the real drama comes not from the enjoyable but contrived set-up, but rather the way that contrived set-up highlights the ongoing struggle for self-improvement, and the simply unfortunate need to be pushed in order to push back.

"To achieve these somewhat lofty goals, Mira crescendos Grand Piano’s suspense to ludicrous heights, formulating complex shots that Brian De Palma would be proud of, and setting the climactic battle against an impromptu, bizarre and deliciously overblown performance of 'Motherless Child.' What better way to finally stop the show than with a proper showstopper?"

Robert Levin, amNew York
"In short, Grand Piano is an extended set piece with tension that starts high and remains elevated throughout. Mira's camera spins, dives and soars throughout the concert hall, ranging from POV images to steady zooms and sustained long shots, with at least one of De Palma's favored split screens thrown in for good measure. You're constantly disoriented, hyper-aware of the stakes at hand."

Scott Pierce, MoviePilot
"It's being touted as Speed or Phone Booth at a concert hall, but in reality comes across as a mostly non-violent giallo mashup inspired by visual directors like Brian de Palma, Alfred Hitchcock, and Dario Argento. It's regimented and structured in a way that few movies today are despite its kitschy premise."

Eric D. Snider, Twitch
"I don't know what Elijah Wood's actual skill level is on the piano, but the way he fakes it here is nothing short of remarkable, and it speaks to his and Mira's commitment to taking the whole thing seriously. It would have been infinitely easier to avoid showing Wood's hands as much as possible, to focus on chest-level shots where we see his arms moving but not which specific keys he's hitting. Instead, Mira gives us long, unbroken takes of Wood banging away on the keyboard, our view of his hands unobstructed so we can see that what he's playing really could be the music we're hearing. The hand-synching, if that's what you call it -- sure, let's call it hand-synching -- is nearly flawless.

"Moreover, Mira and cinematographer Unax Mendia are constantly pulling off carefully orchestrated shots and marvelous feats of camera movement, applying the same type of sweeping, operatic bravura that Brian De Palma applies to everything he does. (I thought of Snake Eyes in particular.) There's something thrilling about seeing such technical precision used in the service of such lunacy. While the screenplay (by Damien Chazelle) is overly expository and larded with repeated dialogue, everything else about the film has energy and confidence and is perfectly capable of carrying you away if you'll go along with its fantastically goofy premise."


Posted by Geoff at 11:30 PM CST
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Wednesday, February 12, 2014
'NURSE 3D' INVITES DE PALMA COMPARISONS
GONZALEZ: 'PASSION' IS "A FIZZY SYMPHONY OF TERROR THAT COMMENTS ON PERSONALITY AS MEDIATED BY IMAGE RECORDING"


Doug Aarniokoski's Nurse 3D opened in theaters and on VOD last Friday, and several reviews have mentioned Brian De Palma. Here are some links:

Peter Sobczynski, RogerEbert.com
"If you ever wondered what the result might be if the screenplay for a Brian De Palma thriller somehow landed in the hands of the late, great Russ Meyer, Nurse 3D is the film for you. Director Douglas Aarniokoski and co-writer David Loughery have concocted a film that plays like an explosion in a warehouse of grindhouse film prints. Within the course of a mere 86 minutes, they jam in gallons of blood, ridiculously ripe performances, tons of beyond-purple dialogue (with the tone set early on when Abby narrates Danni's first encounter with a gory fatality with the instant classic 'She lost her virginity and the blood flowed') and so many scenes involving showers, locker rooms and fetishy outfits that it sometimes feels as if All Saints may be the first hospital to require a two-drink minimum along with proof of insurance."

Devin Faraci, Badass Digest
"If Brian De Palma had directed Nurse 3D it probably could have been something amazing. In the hands of Doug Aarniokoski it’s more of a campy delight. The film straddles the line between serious and silly in all the right ways, never being tongue-in-cheek but also not taking itself too seriously. The film was inspired by the photography of Lionsgate’s chief marketing officer Tim Palen, and every now and again there’s a composition so striking and so well-done that I wonder if Palen lent his eye on the day. A scene where Abbie watches Danni in the hospital shower is perfectly shot, as is one where two characters run down a spiral staircase. Many of the scenes between these gorgeous set pieces are flat (and like, really flat, a problem with a 3D movie), lit with garish reds and blues like Creepshow.

"But the movie is a blast. It’s absolutely over the top, and while it has real slow spots (like every single legit exploitation movie) by the end it is so crazy - Abbie goes on a pointless killing spree in the ICU during a chase - that you’ll be clapping and hollering, just like a grindhouse crowd in 1974. This is definitely a film to watch with a crowd (or at least some friends; the 3D is so useless that seeing it at home will make no difference. Also, it’s only playing in a handful of theaters), and it’s definitely a movie that could have a future as a midnight staple."

Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter
"While the film might have been a guilty pleasure had it been made by the likes of Brian DePalma or Larry Cohen -- not to mention Abel Ferrara, whose similarly themed Ms. 45 is a classic of the genre -- director Doug Aarniokoski and co-screenwriter David Loughery fail to infuse the overly familiar elements with the necessary dark humor."

Ed Gonzalez, Slant
"No sense of moral complication arises from the elaborate and conspicuously far-from-evidence-free bloodbaths that Abby sets into motion against her pussy-blockers. Rather than capture truly pained souls tangled in exuberant horror tropes, the filmmakers settle for retrograde anguish and warmed-over artistry. This isn't idea-rich trash like Passion, a fizzy symphony of terror that commented on personality as mediated by image recording. Capturing evidence of Danni's accidentally cheating ways doesn't complicate Abby, only reveals her to be cut from the same crazy quilt as your garden-variety movie psychopath. Of course, that Nurse 3D suggests a worst-case-scenario gene splice of Orphan and Side Effects, which is to say it's exactly the film that Brian De Palma's naysayers think they see whenever they patronize one of the auteur's works, it at least succeeds in proving the adage that one man's trash is another's treasure."

Jason Shawhan, Nashville Scene
"Director/cowriter Douglas Aarniokoski has a gift for stylish sleaze. There’s one sequence involving a pas de deux on a spiral staircase that has all the elegance of Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill museum pursuit — and in 3D, it’s magnificent. There are also moments that flail about and thud against the walls of cheap studios. You never really know what exactly is going to happen visually, which certainly makes Nurse a different kind of suspense film."

Ryan Turek, Shock Till You Drop
"De La Huerta’s Abby Russell is a nurse by day and a man-eater by night until she meets Katrina Bowden’s Danni, who she develops an unhealthy relationship with – one that involves bad decisions, a three-way, photographs and blackmail. When Danni ultimately rejects Abby’s advances, the story takes a De Palma-esque turn and Abby begins to set Danni up for a string of murders."


Posted by Geoff at 12:41 AM CST
Updated: Wednesday, February 12, 2014 5:19 PM CST
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Saturday, February 8, 2014
BONG JOON-HO CITES DE PALMA AS INSPIRATION
DURING DOUBLE-INTERVIEW WITH TARANTINO AT BUSAN FEST LAST FALL
Posting the other day from the Berlin International Film Festival, Jeffrey Wells stated that "Journos with geek-leaning tastes are trying to get into the Berlinale screenings of Joon-ho Bong‘s Snowpiercer. I know it’s not going to do it for me so I couldn’t care less. I concluded after seeing Mother that Joon-ho Bong is basically a Brian De Palma pretender. He might not be as 'bad' as Park Chan-wook (Stoker) but he’ll do until the next Chan-wook film comes along."

This led Film Freak Central's Bill Chambers to tweet, "Wells calling Bong Joon-ho a Brian De Palma pretender might be the most ill-informed thing he's ever written in the last two days." (See the whole tweet with responses below.) As we noted in 2009, Wells caught a screening of Mother at that year's Cannes Film Festival, and, writing again at his Hollywood Elsewhere blog, called it "a richly stylized Brian De Palma-esque thriller about a mom who mightily endeavors to prove that her mentally handicapped son, accused of killing a young girl, is innocent. There's no doubting that Bong Joon Ho is a De Palma devotee in the same way that De Palma was a Hitchcock acolyte in the '70s and '80s. Mother was by far the most interesting sit because of his immaculate and exacting composition of each and every element. The result is consistently flourishy and at times operatic -- deliberately unnatural, conspicuously acted, very much a director's film. Ho is coming, however, from a fairly well-worn genre place, although I'll give him points for delivering a surprising third-act twist."

And it turns out that perhaps Wells is on to something with the De Palma comparison. At last fall's Busan International Film Festival, according to Twitch, Joon-ho mentioned that as a kid, he was inspired by American films that he later learned were made by the likes of De Palma and John Carpenter. The trick is that Joon-ho did not yet understand English, and so he developed his imagination by reconstructing the stories of the films in his head.

Joon-ho mentioned this during a double-interview with Quentin Tarantino, moderated by Scott Foundas. Tarantino headed out to the festival just to meet Joon-ho after he'd heard from a mutual friend that they were hanging out with Joon-ho at the fest. Twitch's Kwenton Bellette, who posted the selective transcription of the discussion, wrote that, reportedly, "insiders" were suggesting that Joon-ho had been "extremely unhappy" with edits to Snowpiercer, apparently mandated by the notoriously edit-happy Weinstein Company. Bellette speculated that, as "Weinstein stock", Tarantino had been sent there to calm Joon-ho down, but it seems more likely that Tarantino was simply there because he enjoyed Joon-ho's films.

Joon-Ho's citing of De Palma and Carpenter came after Tarantino answered Foundas' question about which filmmakers from Asia had been an inspiration. Here is What Joon-ho said: "I must say my hero in Korean film must be the director of the original Housemaid, Kim Ki-young. Other than this, when I was a kid we have a Korean American broadcast station. At midnight I would sneak out and watch these very sexual and very violent movies. Later I learned these were films by directors like John Carpenter and Brian De Palma, but at the time I could not understand any English so I reconstructed the stories of them in my head, which greatly helped my imagination."


Posted by Geoff at 4:25 PM CST
Updated: Saturday, February 8, 2014 4:29 PM CST
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Wednesday, January 29, 2014
'OUR HEROES' DIRECTOR LOVES MASKS, 'PHANTOM'
"A LOT OF FILMS THAT MADE ME FALL IN LOVE WITH CINEMA FEATURED MASKS"


The title of David Perrault's wrestling noir Our Heroes Died Tonight is, according to AFI, an obscure reference to Robert Wise's The Set-Up, which was released in France under the title Our Heroes Won Tonight. Perrault tells Twitch's Ben Croll that the idea for Our Heroes originated from a picture he saw. "Masks always fascinated me," he explains to Croll. "They fired up my imagination, made me think about identity, and as a director, I simply found them visually interesting. Somehow, a lot of films that made me fall in love with cinema featured masks as well. Films like Phantom of the Paradise, Halloween, Eyes Wide Shut. I ate it up.

"So I stumbled on this picture where you saw a masked wrestler, sitting at a zinc bar in a typically Parisian bistro, sipping his red wine with a straw, and it blew me away. It looked like something out of a superhero movie directed by Jean Pierre Melville. As if a comic book character had ended up in a film noir. And that's it; I knew there was a film, so I started writing the script."


Posted by Geoff at 1:03 AM CST
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Sunday, January 19, 2014
VOLUPTUOUS DOOM
MATT ZOLLER SEITZ COMPARES 'FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC' MUSIC TO DE PALMA'S
Reviewing the adaptation of V.C. Andrews' Flowers In The Attic that airs of the Lifetime network tonight, Vulture's Matt Zoller Seitz states, "Mario Grigorov's score is a resigned lament, mourning the cruelty and suffering you've seen and are about to see; then in tense moments it rises in pitch and intensity, until it sounds like music you'd hear at the end of a Brian De Palma picture that ends in voluptuous doom."

Posted by Geoff at 8:47 PM CST
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Wednesday, January 15, 2014
NEW TORNATORE FILM COMPARED TO DE PALMA
'OBSESSION' & 'FEMME FATALE' MENTIONED, AS WELL AS HITCHCOCK


OregonLive's Jeff Baker yesterday reviewed Giuseppe Tornatore's The Best Offer, which opens Friday in Oregon. Baker notes that this is Tornatore's first all-English film. "The movie, shot in Trieste and Prague, looks great and has a soaring score by Ennio Morricone," says Baker. "It wants badly to be a sophisticated Euro-thriller in the Hitchcock tradition. It ends up as a lame Brian De Palma knockoff, more Femme Fatale than Blow Out. The plot twists are telegraphed from one end of the villa to the other, and if you somehow missed something, Tornatore signals it with portentous dialogue or shows it in a flashback." Well, if we happen to love De Palma's Femme Fatale, will we love this movie?

The Chicago Tribune's Gary Goldstein states that "Although writer-director Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso, Everybody's Fine) certainly puts his own stamp on the intriguing art-world thriller The Best Offer, there's an effective dash of Hitchcock and even a soupcon of 1970s-era De Palma (remember Obsession?) tossed in for good measure."


Posted by Geoff at 1:06 AM CST
Updated: Saturday, February 8, 2014 1:25 AM CST
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Tuesday, December 24, 2013
MORE 'WOLF' & 'SCARFACE', PLUS 'BONFIRE'
ZACHAREK: "'SCARFACE' ROLLS FORWARD IN CRAZY, MELODRAMATIC WAVES"
Last week we linked to a Hollywood Elsewhere post in which Jeffrey Wells called Martin Scorsese's The Wolf Of Wall Street the new Scarface. Reviews of Scorsese's film are proliferating online, and many of them mention that Brian De Palma film, but one review skips that and mentions a different De Palma film instead. "In a way," writes Seattle Weekly's Brian Miller, "this is the movie Brian De Palma tried and failed to make out of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (a book Belfort read in prison, inspiring his memoir). Maybe we’re more prepared to laugh now because we’ve weathered worse financial calamities."

The Village Voice's Stephanie Zacharek states, "There are hints of greatness" in The Wolf Of Wall Street, "one or two artfully constructed scenes that remind you why you look forward to new Scorsese films in the first place. But as a highly detailed portrait of true-life corruption and bad behavior in the financial sector, Wolf is pushy and hollow, too much of a bad thing, like a three-hour cold call from the boiler room that leaves you wondering, 'What have I just been sold?'"

In the concluding paragraph of her review, Zacharek compares Wolf unfavorably to Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, and brings Scorsese to task, writing, "Scorsese is one of the few great old-guard filmmakers with the clout to make movies on this scale, and this picture — dreary, self-evident, too repetitive to be much fun even as satire — is what he comes up with? Some have already favorably compared this with Brian De Palma's Scarface, in that it invites us to revel in its characters' amorality from a safe distance, and at epic length. But that's a slippery, surface-level comparison. Scarface is violent as hell, and operatically blunt, but, oddly enough, it's not an aggressive picture. It rolls forward in crazy, melodramatic waves, without pushing its points about the horrors human beings are willing to commit in the name of capitalism. It doesn't have to, when there's a chain saw to do the talking. Scorsese, on the other hand, belabors every angle of this lukewarm morality tale. It's self-conscious and devoid of passion, and there's no radiant star at its center. Who would choose DiCaprio's depraved, squeaky Jordan Belfort over Al Pacino's twisted, basso profundo Tony Montana? The Wolf of Wall Street has everything money can buy, and still, it comes up empty."


Posted by Geoff at 3:31 AM CST
Updated: Tuesday, December 24, 2013 3:33 AM CST
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Tuesday, December 17, 2013
NEW TRAILER FOR 'GRAND PIANO'
INCLUDES QUOTE, "PROBABLY THE BEST BRIAN DE PALMA MOVIE HE NEVER MADE"


'GRAND PIANO' REVIEWS CITE DE PALMA, HITCH & ARGENTO

Posted by Geoff at 6:51 PM CST
Updated: Tuesday, December 17, 2013 6:53 PM CST
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